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In this ReadWriteWeb Hangout, Robyn and Jon speculate wildly about who, if anyone, will acquire Pinterest. Robyn collected responses to the question from RWW readers all week, and they discussed all the possibilities. Jon was pretty sure of himself at first, but Robyn convinced him of her pick by the end.

We hang out at 11:00 a.m. Pacific on Thursdays, and you’re welcome to join us or just watch live. (Here’s the time for every time zone.) Make sure to follow +ReadWriteWeb on Google+ if you want to watch or participate. We’d love to have you!

If the Facebook IPO and Pinterest’s $1.5 billion valuation mean anything, it’s that social media have become business as usual. Everybody’s full of social media advice and best practices these days. For today’s Big Question, we asked the savvy RWW readers to share their tips.

If you could give someone one piece of advice about social media, what would it be?

We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and now we’re presenting them back to you with Storify. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

If the Facebook IPO and Pinterest’s $1.5 billion valuation mean anything, it’s that social media have become business as usual. Everybody’s full of social media advice and best practices these days. For today’s Big Question, we asked the savvy RWW readers to share their tips.

If you could give someone one piece of advice about social media, what would it be?

We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and now we’re presenting them back to you with Storify. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

There’s wonderful news this week. Facebook’s frictionless “social reading” apps have seen a devastating decline in traffic. It was tempting to just blame it on how much they suck, but as Josh Constine rightly pointed out, the real story is that Facebook turned off the traffic hose. The lack of control should be reason enough for publishers to abandon them. But the better reason is that they throw readers under the bus.

Anti-Social Reader Apps

Facebook has been tinkering with the presentation of stories from Open Graph reading apps over the past month or so. The most noticeable change is that they’ve moved from the ticker in the sidebar to a big, ugly blob in the News Feed called “Trending Articles.” Of course, these aren’t really the most popular articles on Facebook, just the ones people shared passively through social reader apps.

Here’s a typical example of what the Trending Articles box looks like:

Do you think Bill is glad Facebook broadcasted the fact that he clicked on that story?

Facebook Has The Power

In the wake of some easy blog posts about the decline of social reader apps, their defenders (read: the publications who use them) began explaining publicly that this was all due to Facebook’s manipulation of its interface. The CEO of Storify, Burt Herman, collected this conversation in an interesting Storify post.

In the mother of all annoying Internet ironies, I learned by clicking on this link from Twitter that Storify had become a social reader app itself.

What a shame! I had given Storify permission to post to my Timeline before, back when I had to share to Facebook intentionally, and it used that permission to share my reading habits automatically.

“Just An Experiment”

Herman tells me that the feature has been there for a while, and it’s “just an experiment” to try and draw more attention to the great work of Storify’s authors, which, in Storify’s case, are its users. But what about the readers? Why should they have to opt out of broadcasting information about themselves, especially on a site like Storify, where people read politically sensitive stories?

The question gives Herman pause. “It’s interesting. Do I want everything I read to be broadcasted? To be honest, I’m not sure I always do,” Herman says. “Which is why, on Storify at least, I cancel it when it’s not something I want to share.” Should readers have to be on guard and take that extra step?

And what’s the upside of frictionless sharing? Why is this good for readers? “I mean, clearly it’s more meaningful when someone decides to actively share something,” Herman says. “It would be bad if a share from just happening to read something through Open Graph got the same weight as something that you actually shared.”

If that were the case, Facebook would fill News Feeds with passively shared stories as if they were equally important as intentional shares. It is indeed fortunate that Facebook doesn’t currently work that way. So should publishers leave that choice up to Facebook and its indifferent algorithms?

In Storify’s defense, it’s pretty easy to turn off the frictionless sharing, and it’s just one part of an otherwise useful set of Facebook integrations. If you’re quick, you can even cancel a share from the top nav bar before it goes out to Facebook. But you still have to opt out yourself. It’s disappointing to see so many great publishers turn over so much of their user experience to Facebook.

The Attention Paywall

“Social reader” apps are just like paywalls, except instead of money, readers pay with their friends’ attention. It’s a feature built to benefit Facebook first and publishers second. There’s not much left for the user after that.

Instead of a willful act of sharing, which says to your Facebook friends, “This matters to me,” frictionless sharing is just a broadcast of your Internet habits. There’s no benefit for you except as a kind of vain performance, and there’s very little benefit to your friends, since the signal-to-noise ratio goes way up.

In the worst cases, such as the Washington Post’s Facebook app, your friends have to install an app, giving the Washington Post access to their News Feeds, before they can even read the article! To call that a “social” app is just a cynical ploy.

These kinds of features are all about Facebook, because Facebook is where the easy eyeballs are. “Facebook has a lot of power,” Herman says. “You can’t deny that there’s hundreds of millions of people on Facebook, right?” When Facebook tweaked the interface for displaying social reader stories, it upended the strategy many publishers had relied on to reach those people with minimal effort. That’s not a sustainable way to build an audience.

“Clearly, [Facebook is] doing some tweaking with the algorithm to make it less prominent,” Herman says. “I guess they’re realizing, you know, maybe these things aren’t as engaging as they thought they would be.”

There’s wonderful news this week. Facebook’s frictionless “social reading” apps have seen a devastating decline in traffic. It was tempting to just blame it on how much they suck, but as Josh Constine rightly pointed out, the real story is that Facebook turned off the traffic hose. The lack of control should be reason enough for publishers to abandon them. But the better reason is that they throw readers under the bus.

Anti-Social Reader Apps

Facebook has been tinkering with the presentation of stories from Open Graph reading apps over the past month or so. The most noticeable change is that they’ve moved from the ticker in the sidebar to a big, ugly blob in the News Feed called “Trending Articles.” Of course, these aren’t really the most popular articles on Facebook, just the ones people shared passively through social reader apps.

Here’s a typical example of what the Trending Articles box looks like:

Do you think Bill is glad Facebook broadcasted the fact that he clicked on that story?

Facebook Has The Power

In the wake of some easy blog posts about the decline of social reader apps, their defenders (read: the publications who use them) began explaining publicly that this was all due to Facebook’s manipulation of its interface. The CEO of Storify, Burt Herman, collected this conversation in an interesting Storify post.

In the mother of all annoying Internet ironies, I learned by clicking on this link from Twitter that Storify had become a social reader app itself.

What a shame! I had given Storify permission to post to my Timeline before, back when I had to share to Facebook intentionally, and it used that permission to share my reading habits automatically.

“Just An Experiment”

Herman tells me that the feature has been there for a while, and it’s “just an experiment” to try and draw more attention to the great work of Storify’s authors, which, in Storify’s case, are its users. But what about the readers? Why should they have to opt out of broadcasting information about themselves, especially on a site like Storify, where people read politically sensitive stories?

The question gives Herman pause. “It’s interesting. Do I want everything I read to be broadcasted? To be honest, I’m not sure I always do,” Herman says. “Which is why, on Storify at least, I cancel it when it’s not something I want to share.” Should readers have to be on guard and take that extra step?

And what’s the upside of frictionless sharing? Why is this good for readers? “I mean, clearly it’s more meaningful when someone decides to actively share something,” Herman says. “It would be bad if a share from just happening to read something through Open Graph got the same weight as something that you actually shared.”

If that were the case, Facebook would fill News Feeds with passively shared stories as if they were equally important as intentional shares. It is indeed fortunate that Facebook doesn’t currently work that way. So should publishers leave that choice up to Facebook and its indifferent algorithms?

In Storify’s defense, it’s pretty easy to turn off the frictionless sharing, and it’s just one part of an otherwise useful set of Facebook integrations. If you’re quick, you can even cancel a share from the top nav bar before it goes out to Facebook. But you still have to opt out yourself. It’s disappointing to see so many great publishers turn over so much of their user experience to Facebook.

The Attention Paywall

“Social reader” apps are just like paywalls, except instead of money, readers pay with their friends’ attention. It’s a feature built to benefit Facebook first and publishers second. There’s not much left for the user after that.

Instead of a willful act of sharing, which says to your Facebook friends, “This matters to me,” frictionless sharing is just a broadcast of your Internet habits. There’s no benefit for you except as a kind of vain performance, and there’s very little benefit to your friends, since the signal-to-noise ratio goes way up.

In the worst cases, such as the Washington Post’s Facebook app, your friends have to install an app, giving the Washington Post access to their News Feeds, before they can even read the article! To call that a “social” app is just a cynical ploy.

These kinds of features are all about Facebook, because Facebook is where the easy eyeballs are. “Facebook has a lot of power,” Herman says. “You can’t deny that there’s hundreds of millions of people on Facebook, right?” When Facebook tweaked the interface for displaying social reader stories, it upended the strategy many publishers had relied on to reach those people with minimal effort. That’s not a sustainable way to build an audience.

“Clearly, [Facebook is] doing some tweaking with the algorithm to make it less prominent,” Herman says. “I guess they’re realizing, you know, maybe these things aren’t as engaging as they thought they would be.”

A lot of journalists are going to conferences and being told to use Storify, a site that lets you curate loads of social media on a given topic and present them in a narrative or timeline: you can, for example, pull tweets and YouTube videos, urls and Facebook posts.

That is generally a good thing, providing they do it right. But, unfortunately, like a lot of things related to social media, people end up doing it just to say they’re doing it and don’t spend too much time thinking about how to do it well.

She broke up the tweets with narrative and text boxes that gave readers a sense of what was happening and what the content she was curating referred to.

She used tweets from the journalists covering the event, including the student newspaper she works for, but she also made sure to include loads of content from the people attending the rally. That is the biggest value for journalists using Storify: it’s a way to quickly show readers what kind of reaction an event or topic is getting on social media.

She made sure she gave enough background to readers who were just joining the story, but didn’t get bogged down too much in the back story: Readers were primarily going to her Storify to get a quick snapshot of the day’s events. Most knew about the attack on a student journalist that prompted student leaders to organize the rally and were looking for what was happening at the event itself.

She worked with an editor. Classes meant she didn’t get the Storify until several hours after the event ended (and several hours after the Brockton Enterprise reporter threw his up for public viewing). But before she sent it out she worked with an editor to identify the focus and the prupose of the Storify and to get the wording right in the narrative transitions she wrote. Our instinct when we use social media is to do it fast, but taking the extra time to do it well only benefits readers.

What the pro did wrong:

Aside from a brief introduction, there were no text breaks to put the content pulled from social media into context. In addition, there were only a handful of photos to break up the long line of tweets, which made it difficult to read.

He relied heavily on his own tweets and tweets from other reporters covering the event. The tweets from students and faculty members who attended the event were limited to a handful of students and failed to capture the views of the participants.

There wasn’t enough background: Storify is about telling a story, and there needs to be a narrative. Readers who hadn’t heard about the story (it did, after all, break over a holiday weekend) would have been lost if they relied solely on his Storify.

He posted his Storify first, which is important in journalism, but that didn’t necessarily mean he told the story better. It reads like a link dump — lots of information, some of it redundant.

Full Disclosure: I’m most likely biased in my critique. I’m the faculty adviser for the newspaper the student works for. Kaitlin Wallace, the student in question, had never even heard of Storify until I required her class to use it for a project last semester.